Seduction 101
by Anidori-Kiladra
Summary: Annie's got it all planned out, The Seduction of Jeff, and wine plays a pivotal role.


**Seduction 101**

"You guys!" Annie says, wringing her hands and jumping up and down just a little bit. "Why did you drink my wine?" The wine was important. Annie had been planning to use that wine to seduce Jeff, before Troy and Abed drank it.

Troy gives Abed a look that is alarmed and something else she can't decipher. Finally, Abed jumps in. "We thought Chang had kidnapped Annie's Boobs, so we had to get him drunk to find out. It was the only thing we could find."

Annie pouts some more, but she's not really all _that_ mad. Even though she wishes (even though she secretly kind of loves it) that Troy had named the stupid monkey something else.

She is a little mad, though. Because she had it all planned out, The Seduction of Jeff, and the wine played a pivotal role.

The plan's been forming for months: After her performance at Christmastime, that was the first time Annie knew he could be seduced, instead of just doing the seducing. But how to do it? And that was when Annie had thought of the wine.

Okay, so maybe the plan only took five minutes to form and Annie's just been waiting months for the perfect moment because perfect moments are _hard_ and one hardly ever seems to come along.

She thought there might have been one at Troy and Abed's housewarming party—before their apartment became her apartment too—when she looked at Jeff's head in the kitchen and he was smiling at her and she could see the crinkles under his eyes and maybe something in them, too, something like love.

But then again, the lighting in the kitchen had been really bad until Annie bought all those soft-glow bulbs and spent an afternoon installing them in every room in the apartment. Except the Dreamatorium, of course, because some things even Annie knows not to touch.

And anyway, nothing had happened at that party except for some excellent dancing and Britta actually hugging her, which was always a nice and unexpected surprise.

But Annie knows it has to happen soon. And she knows that the only way it's going to happen is with wine, because that's the only way she's going to have enough courage to actually say what she wants to say and stop hiding behind her excuses and her complicated, multi-layered issues (which are totally there and totally real and totally don't make her want Jeff any less, because yeah, sure Annie wants unconditional love, but she would also really like to see Jeff naked).

She thinks wine would probably help Jeff too, help him to loosen up and stop hiding behind all of _his _issues, because they all know he's got them too. But Annie is sure that underneath all of them, there's something in Jeff that sees something special in Annie, something that likes her just as much and in (almost) the same way as she likes him.

So once it's been firmly spring for a while (Annie knows because she hasn't had to pull out one of her cardigans in weeks) and officially four months since Annie first started plotting what she knows is the most worn-out plot in all the world of girls who love boys who may or may not love them back, Annie knows it's time.

It also helps that she's been having the apartment to herself a lot lately. It seems like both Abed and Troy are staying away more often, poking their heads cautiously around the door when they come back in. And the funny thing is that they don't even seem to be away together. It's almost like they're _avoiding_ each other, but that doesn't make sense at all. Annie resolves to spend some time figuring it out once this whole seducing Jeff thing is done.

.

She starts by appealing to his masculinity. That's really important, Annie knows. For every guy but especially with Jeff.

So she calls him. "Jeff," she says, trying to make her voice sound frantic. It's not actually all that difficult, given how hard her pulse is beating in her throat. "The sink in the kitchen broke and now it's spraying water everywhere. And Troy and Abed aren't picking up their phones and if I call a plumber the landlord will know and he'll hate us even more and I don't know what to dooooo."

Jeff cuts in, voice dry and cracker-crisp, as she knew it would be. "Annie," he says. "Calm down. I'll be over in a few minutes." And Annie thanks him and hangs up the phone and smiles and smoothes down her skirt.

She goes into her room, stands in front of the mirror and carefully applies just a dab of bubblegum lip gloss, then wipes it all off and throws the tube into the trash for a reason she can't quite name to herself. Just a feeling. She gets those sometimes, when she just knows something is right. Like her and Jeff. They're right.

Well, they're kind of wrong in a lot of ways. Annie knows that. But still. The way he looks at her sometimes, the way his forehead crinkles and his eyebrows go down out of their perpetual sarcastic arc, the way he gives her that little smile across the study room when Troy does something silly or when Shirley starts talking about baking. There's nothing more right than that look.

By the time Jeff gets there, Annie is sitting poised at the table, ankles crossed and hands shaking so bad that she wants to shake herself.

"What happened to the sink?" he asks.

"Oh," Annie says, willing breezy into her voice. "I figured out how to turn it off. I tried to text you but it must not have gone through."

"Oh," Jeff says, and sits down at the table anyway. Annie holds her breath and tries without success to tell herself not to read too much into it. "Must not have been too broken, then."

"I guess not," Annie says.

Jeff gives her a sideways look, mouth quirking and eyes halfway shut, and Annie rushes forward before he can say anything else. "I did find this bottle of wine under the sink, though," she says, gesturing to the (inferior) bottle on the counter and almost stumbling on the lines she practiced. "If you wanted to have a glass. Since you came all this way."

"I'm not much of a wine drinker anymore," Jeff says. "Pierce kind of ruined it for me when we took that class," and Annie nods sympathetically.

"I prefer things straight," Jeff goes on, and Annie figures she's not going to get a better opening than that.

"In that case," she says, "Do you want to get drunk and fuck?"

"Annie!" Jeff sounds scandalized the way he only ever sounds about her. Like that time he found out she was doctoring gunshot wound outside her old apartment. "I don't know if I'm entirely comfortable with you saying that word."

"Well, I don't want to make you uncomfortable…" Annie smiles, scooting her chair closer. "I just figured, we've had all this tension for so long, it seemed like the easiest way to just deal with it."

"Is that what you want? To just deal with it?" And there's a hardness there suddenly, in Jeff's voice and in his body as he stands up from the table, that wasn't there before.

"What?" Annie is confused, insides twisting at the unexpected accusation in his voice. "No. I mean…no. I've wanted this for a long time."

"When you want something, Annie…" Jeff trails off, runs a hand through his hair, looks at her. "When you want someone, Annie, you don't—you don't do it like this."

Annie opens her mouth and then closes it again. She feels extremely strongly like she is about to cry, loud and ugly, and wills herself to look back at him. "What do you mean?"

And Jeff still sounds angry, but like all the heat has gone out of it. Like mostly now he is just tired. "You don't invite someone over under false pretenses and then make lewd suggestions and try to get them drunk."

Annie opens her mouth again. "I'm sorry, I…" and finds she has no idea what to say and also that the tears are burning now, right at the corners of her eyes.

"You don't have to be sorry, Annie," Jeff says, and his voice is going up again, taking on strength like it does when he's giving speeches to the group. "You just have to understand. I've _done_ this. I've done this a hundred times with a hundred girls and—"

"Jeff, _stop_," Annie says, and now she starts to get angry too. Because even if she was an idiot about it (she's _always_ been an idiot where Jeff's concerned), he shouldn't make her feel so bad about it. And he definitely shouldn't be talking about other girls. Because no matter what, even if you're Jeff Winger, that's just mean.

"No! Listen to me, Annie." Annie turns away, lip bit and arms crossed, but she listens. Jeff's breath catches and then after that his breathing is hard, like he's been sprinting. "I've done this. I've done this and I've done this and I've thought I was being suave, being cool and sexy and whatever. And maybe I was. But it _never works_." He grabs her arm, tugs her around gentle, till she's facing him, till she's looking up and gulping and sure that she's never looked worse in her life, not even in high school.

"It never works, Annie, starting this way. And it's not fair, to me or to you or to anybody else who's ever tried it. Because you're making it a game—_I _made it a game—and if it starts with a game, it hardly ever turns out to be real, you know?"

He's looking at her, fingers gripping her upper arms and leaning down so their faces are right up close. And Annie stops thinking about the fact that her nose is running a little, that her lips still smell faintly of bubblegum. She stops picturing the fuzziness of wine and the slow easing of mouths on mouths turning to frantic ripping off of clothes before they've even reached her bedroom. Annie stops imagining and just looks at Jeff, looks at him right now.

"Does that mean you _want_ this to be real?" she asks, and braces herself for him to tell her she's being ridiculous again (little Annie Edison, always ridiculous, never taken seriously, never a real contender).

But instead his fingers release her and his arms slide around her shoulders and his chin rests on top of her head, so she can feel it move as he says, "I don't know, Annie. Sometimes, I think so. A lot of the time, I think so. Maybe even most of the time."

Annie gives a little hiccup, feels that release in her chest that she always feels after she's gotten the highest score in the class on a test she was worried about, the satisfaction of getting what she wants and finding herself still with a tiny spot of emptiness.

"But?" she asks.

Jeff laughs a little and she can feel it in her hair. "But not like this, Annie. Not with lies and wine and trying to be something that's not real."

"Sometimes real isn't very nice, though," Annie says, and feels safe enough again to bury her head in his chest.

She can't see anything from there, but she feels Jeff's hands as they move again, smoothing over her shoulders and up her neck to cup her face and pull it away from him, forcing her to meet his eyes again.

"No," he says, "Sometimes it's not. But I guess if Greendale's taught me anything, it's that sometimes the not-nice things are better."

He kisses her then, lips pressing down and then sucking back just a little bit. He kisses her once long, once short, and then once on the forehead, and Annie fists her hands in the back of his shirt and thinks distantly that, knowing Jeff and his shirts, she's probably making it wrinkle.

When he pulls back, she laughs and wipes her nose and says, "Better not let the Dean hear you saying Greendale taught you something. You know he'll take all the credit."

Jeff laughs too. "Yeah." Then he just stands there, smiling down at her with his eyes all crinkly and his mouth all adorable, until Annie stands on her tiptoes and kisses him again.

"So," she says after _that's_ over, "So this is…something?" and only feels a tiny bit ridiculous.

"Yes," he says, voice even now. Sure. "This is something."

"Something," Annie says and thinks she'd better say something else fast before they start smiling at each other again and create some sort of time loop. She also thinks it's possible she's been spending more time with Abed than is strictly healthy, sci-fi reference-wise, but that is a thought for another time, a time when Jeff Winger is not standing there in her living room, smiling at her.

"So you really pulled the wine trick with hundreds of girls?" she asks instead, and Jeff loops an arm around her shoulders and starts to walk toward the door, and Annie knows that that particular time loop is out of the question for now.

"Well, maybe not hundreds," Jeff says. "And I always had better lies than the-sink-is-broken." He taps her on the nose, then leans down and kisses it and then her mouth. "I expect you to be more creative next time."

"There won't be a next time," Annie says, and feels just a tiny bit vindicated by the way Jeff's face falls. "I mean," she continues, eyes down then back up to his face fast, "next time I won't lie."

Jeff's face pulls itself back up (probably by the eyebrows, Annie thinks, the way they say people pull themselves up by their bootstraps, which is a phrase that has never really made much sense). He runs his knuckles over her cheek and opens the door.

Annie watches him walk down the badly lit hallway (she should think about getting some bulbs out here, too), rests her cheek against the door frame and thinks, _next time_.


End file.
